Date of Award

Document Type

Degree Name

Department

First Advisor

Keywords

Abstract

Author: J. Kabamba Kiboko

Title: DIVINATION IN 1 SAMUEL 28 AND BEYOND: AN AFRICAN STUDY IN THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION

Advisor: Dr. Gregory A. Robbins

Degree Date: March 2010

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the language of divination in the HB, particularly in 1 Samuel 28:3-27--the oft-called "Witch of Endor" passage. My thesis is that much of the vocabulary of divination in this passage and beyond has been mistranslated in authorized English and other translations used in Africa and in scholarly writings. I argue that the woman of Endor is not a witch, which is a label that has a long negative social history and has often led to violence against those so labeled. The woman of Endor is, rather, a diviner, much like other ancient Near Eastern and modern African diviners. She resists an inner-biblical conquest theology and a monologic authoritarian view of divination to assist King Saul by various means, including invoking the spirit of a departed person, Samuel. I suggest that the violence done to the woman of Endor through such mistranslation stems from ideological forces that have been in ascendancy during such periods of translation. These ideological forces have attempted to exert an extra-biblical monologic authoritarian view of divination in the HB in order to serve their own Christian, imperial-colonial, and misogynist interests, all of which have been particularly problematic in the African missionary context. Translators steeped in such ideology, whether consciously or unconsciously, mistranslated what is fundamentally a heteroglossic, polyvalent, dialogic text that seeks to undermine any authoritarian voices in regard to divination.

To demonstrate my thesis, I carry out a Hebrew word-study shaped by the theories of Mikhail M. Bakhtin regarding the utterance, heteroglossia, and dialogism in order to understand the designative, connotative, emotive, and associative meanings of the many divinatory terms in the Hebrew Bible. I then examine 1 Samuel 28 and a number of prior translations thereof, using the ideological framework of African-feminist-postcolonial biblical interpreters and translation theories to uncover the hidden ideology or transcript of these translations. Finally, using African contextual / cultural hermeneutics and cross-cultural translation theory, I offer new English, French, and Kisanga translations of this passage that are both faithful to the original text and more appropriate to an inculturated-liberation African Christian hermeneutic, theology, and praxis.